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Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Will Listening to Mozart Really Make You Smarter? [Science]
If Gingrich loses in Fla., can he come back again? (AP)
ORLANDO, Fla. ? Can Newt Gingrich come back a third time?
If he loses Tuesday in Florida's primary ? polls predict he will _Gingrich will spend the next month trying to prove the answer is yes.
"We were dead in June and July . but we came roaring back and we will again," Gingrich said at a rally Monday in Tampa.
Still, the former House speaker, who has pledged to fight on until the GOP convention this summer, faces a tough road out of Florida. He plunges next into a scattershot series of state contests where he has little organization and must overcome steep odds to win.
Gingrich was hoping to ride a wave of enthusiasm to a win in Florida and beyond, stoked by his decisive victory in South Carolina. But unless he pulls off an upset win Tuesday, he will have squandered that momentum heading into states that look favorable for leading rival Mitt Romney.
After being battered by the well-funded Romney political machine, the Gingrich campaign will redouble its efforts to "tell the truth about Romney faster and more efficiently than he can lie about us," Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said.
The calendar works against Gingrich rebounding anytime soon. After a steady march through four state contests in January, the pace quickens before taking a long breather next month.
There are seven elections in February, which kicks off with Nevada's caucuses Saturday. That will be followed by contests next week in Colorado, Minnesota and Maine as well as a non-binding primary in Missouri. A 17-day break will be capped by primaries in Arizona and Michigan on Feb. 28.
The schedule benefits a candidate, like Romney, with deep pockets and a sophisticated ground game able to compete on multiple fronts at once. Gingrich, who failed to even get on the ballot in his home state of Virginia for the March 6 Super Tuesday primary, is playing catch-up.
"We're behind the eight-ball," acknowledged George Harris, a Las Vegas restaurant owner who serves as a national finance chair for Gingrich and is helping his efforts in Nevada.
Romney has had staff in the state since June and has already begun running ads there. And he's a known quantity in the state, having won it when he sought the GOP nomination in 2008.
Gingrich dispatched six staffers to Nevada just days ago and they have rapidly built the operation from the ground up.
Maine is in the former Massachusetts governor's back yard and, in a show of force, he has 40 state legislators backing him. Another candidate, Ron Paul, also has a strong network of support in the state, a holdover from his 2008 presidential run.
Gingrich aides are aiming to hang on.
"We're getting a late start here," said John Grooms, Gingrich's grassroots director in Maine, who until December was backing Herman Cain. "The goal here is to have a good, respectable showing."
Romney grew up in Michigan and is still looked at as something of favorite son among Republicans in the state.
Romney claimed both Colorado and Michigan in 2008 and maintains networks in each state.
Just 10 days ago, an ebullient Gingrich touched down in Florida, fresh off his win in South Carolina and drawing cheering crowds of thousands. It was a far different tone as he wrapped up his campaign Monday with a lap around the state. Crowds were far sparser, and although Gingrich kept up the attacks on Romney, he sometimes sounded tired as he raced from Jacksonville to Pensacola to Fort Myers.
The Gingrich camp sought to put a positive spin on what is expected to be a disappointing showing in Florida, where the winner will scoop up all 50 delegates.
A memo from Gingrich political director Martin Baker made the case that moving forward, delegates will be awarded proportionally, meaning that even if Romney racks up wins the delegate count could remain tight so long as the races are competitive.
Baker noted that no matter who wins Florida, only 5 percent of the 2,288 national convention delegates will have been awarded.
"The campaign is shifting to a new phase where opportunities are not limited to a single state," Baker wrote.
Gingrich aides also said they had succeeded in effectively making the race a two-man contest, with Gingrich surviving as the conservative alternative to Romney. Rick Santorum, who had been splitting the conservative vote with Gingrich, is trailing badly in Florida.
Gingrich's prospects improve when the race sweeps back South on Super Tuesday. The Bible Belt is his sweet spot and his onetime home state of Georgia is in the mix with its 76 delegates.
"The math doesn't get better for us until much later in the game," Hammond acknowledged.
Gingrich will have to survive until then. He fought his way back into the GOP race last year after his top aides resigned en masse in the spring. He rallied again in South Carolina after a barrage of attack ads knocked him from front-runner status in Iowa.
Harris, in Nevada, says a repeat won't be impossible.
"The thing I love about Newt is that he's a fighter," he said. "Every time you think you've knocked him down he gets back up and knocks you in the face."
___
Follow Shannon McCaffrey: www.twitter.com/smccaffrey13
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Monday, January 30, 2012
Keystone to be linked to U.S. highway bill: Boehner (reuters)
Marilyn Stowe: The Top 10 Stereotypical Marriage Wreckers
The toned beefcake or shapely siren at the local gym is paid to get you hot and sweaty. They are therapists and personal trainers rolled into one who flirt to get you to use their services, listen to your problems and then see you at your most intimate, exhausted and scantily-clad. A level of trust and attraction is natural. As the endorphin rush kicks in, this relationship can easily cross the line.
The toned beefcake or shapely siren at the local gym is paid to get you hot and sweaty. They are therapists and personal trainers rolled into one who flirt to get you to use their services, listen to your problems and then see you at your most intimate, exhausted and scantily-clad. A level of trust and attraction is natural. As the endorphin rush kicks in, this relationship can easily cross the line.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marilyn-stowe/the-top-10-stereotypical-_b_1235222.html
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Sunday, January 29, 2012
Romney would rank among richest presidents ever (AP)
WASHINGTON ? Just how rich is Mitt Romney? Add up the wealth of the last eight presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Then double that number. Now you're in Romney territory.
He would be among the richest presidents in American history if elected ? probably in the top four.
He couldn't top George Washington who, with nearly 60,000 acres and more than 300 slaves, is considered the big daddy of presidential wealth. After that, it gets complicated, depending how you rate Thomas Jefferson's plantation, Herbert Hoover's millions from mining or John F. Kennedy's share of the vast family fortune, as well as the finer points of factors like inflation adjustment.
But it's safe to say the Roosevelts had nothing on Romney, and the Bushes are nowhere close.
The former Massachusetts governor has disclosed only the broad outlines of his wealth, putting it somewhere from $190 million to $250 million. That easily could make him 50 times richer than Obama, who falls in the still-impressive-to-most-of-us range of $2.2 million to $7.5 million.
"I think it's almost hard to conceptualize what $250 million means," said Shamus Khan, a Columbia University sociologist who studies the wealthy. "People say Romney made $50,000 a day while not working last year. What do you do with all that money? I can't even imagine spending it. Well, maybe ..."
Of course, an unbelievable boatload of bucks is just one way to think of Romney's net worth, and the 44 U.S. presidents make up a pretty small pond for him to swim in. Put alongside America's 400 or so billionaires, Romney wouldn't make a ripple.
So here's a look where Romney's riches rank ? among the most flush Americans, the White House contenders, and the rest of us:
_Within the 1 percent:
"Romney is small potatoes compared with the ultra-wealthy," said Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies the nation's elites.
After all, even in the rarefied world of the top 1 percent, there's a big difference between life at the top and at the bottom.
A household needs to bring in roughly $400,000 per year to make the cut. Romney and his wife, Ann, have been making 50 times that ? more than $20 million a year. In 2009, only 8,274 federal tax filers had income above $10 million. Romney is solidly within that elite 0.006 percent of all U.S. taxpayers.
Congress is flush with millionaires. Only a few are in the Romney realm, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Kerry's ranking would climb much higher if the fortune of his wife, Teresa Heinz, were counted. She is the widow of Sen. John Heinz, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune.
Further up the ladder, top hedge fund managers can pocket $1 billion or more in a single year.
At the top of the wealth pile sits Bill Gates, worth $59 billion, according to Forbes magazine's estimates.
_As a potential president:
Romney clearly stands out here. America's super rich generally don't jockey to live in the White House. A few have toyed with the idea, most notably New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whom Forbes ranks as the 12th richest American, worth $19.5 billion. A lesser billionaire, Ross Perot, bankrolled his own third-party campaigns in 1992 and 1996.
Many presidents weren't particularly well-off, especially 19th century leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan and Ulysses S. Grant. Nor was the 33rd president, Harry Truman.
"These things ebb and flow," said sociologist Khan. "It's not the case that all presidents were always rich."
A few former chief executives died in debt, including Thomas Jefferson, ranked in a Forbes study as the third-wealthiest president.
Comparing the landlocked wealth of early Americans such as Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, with today's millionaires is tricky, even setting aside the lack of documentation and economic changes over two centuries.
Research by 24/7 Wall St., a news and analysis website, estimated Washington's wealth at the equivalent of $525 million in 2010 dollars.
Yet Washington had to borrow money to pay for his trip to New York for his inauguration in 1789, according to Dennis Pogue, vice president for preservation at Mount Vernon, Washington's Virginia estate. His money was tied up in land, reaping only a modest cash income after farm expenses.
"He was a wealthy guy, there's no doubt about it," Pogue said, and probably among the dozen richest Virginians of his time. But, "the wealthiest person in America then was nothing in comparison to what these folks are today."
_How does Romney stand next to a regular Joe?
He's roughly 1,800 times richer.
The typical U.S. household was worth $120,300 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau's most recent data, although that number is sure to have dropped since the recession. A typical family's income is $50,000.
Calculations from 24/7 Wall St. of the peak lifetime wealth (or peak so far) of Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama add up to a total $128 million ? while Romney reports assets of up to $250 million.
If you consider only those presidents' assets while in office, without millions earned later from speeches and books, their combined total would be substantially lower, and Romney's riches would leave the pack even further behind.
___
Online:
Forbes' richest presidents list: http://tinyurl.com/82erdyb
24/7 Wall St. on presidents' net worth: http://tinyurl.com/328qyu2
___
Associated Press writer Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.
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Charges weigh on Procter & Gamble profit (Reuters)
(Reuters) ? Procter & Gamble Co's (PG.N) quarterly profit plunged 49 percent, as the world's largest household products maker wrote down the value of its appliance and salon professional products businesses, and it said this year's profit would come in lower than previously expected due to the strong dollar.
Excluding charges, core earnings per share fell 3 percent to $1.10, as sales growth and cost cuts were not enough to offset double-digit increases in commodity costs. The profit came in ahead of analysts' average forecast of $1.08 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
P&G earned $1.69 billion, or 57 cents per share, in the second quarter ended in December, down from $3.33 billion, or $1.11 per share, a year earlier.
Sales rose 4 percent to $22.14 billion.
Organic sales, which strip out the impact of acquisitions, asset sales and currency fluctuations, rose in each business unit and were up 4 percent overall.
The volume of goods sold rose 1 percent, with strong growth in developing markets overtaking a decline in volume in developed regions.
For the fiscal year ending in June, P&G forecast core earnings of $4.00 to $4.10 per share, down from a prior forecast of $4.15 to $4.33 per share due largely to foreign exchange.
It said fiscal 2012 sales should rise 3 percent to 4 percent on a net basis and 4 percent to 5 percent on an organic basis.
Its shares were down 5 cents at $64.75 in premarket trading, after closing at $64.80 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
(Reporting by Jessica Wohl in Chicago; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Derek Caney)
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Saturday, January 28, 2012
No energy industry backing for the word 'fracking' (AP)
NEW YORK ? A different kind of F-word is stirring a linguistic and political debate as controversial as what it defines.
The word is "fracking" ? as in hydraulic fracturing, a technique long used by the oil and gas industry to free oil and gas from rock.
It's not in the dictionary, the industry hates it, and President Barack Obama didn't use it in his State of the Union speech ? even as he praised federal subsidies for it.
The word sounds nasty, and environmental advocates have been able to use it to generate opposition ? and revulsion ? to what they say is a nasty process that threatens water supplies.
"It obviously calls to mind other less socially polite terms, and folks have been able to take advantage of that," said Kate Sinding, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on drilling issues.
One of the chants at an anti-drilling rally in Albany earlier this month was "No fracking way!"
Industry executives argue that the word is deliberately misspelled by environmental activists and that it has become a slur that should not be used by media outlets that strive for objectivity.
"It's a co-opted word and a co-opted spelling used to make it look as offensive as people can try to make it look," said Michael Kehs, vice president for Strategic Affairs at Chesapeake Energy, the nation's second-largest natural gas producer.
To the surviving humans of the sci-fi TV series "Battlestar Galactica," it has nothing to do with oil and gas. It is used as a substitute for the very down-to-Earth curse word.
Michael Weiss, a professor of linguistics at Cornell University, says the word originated as simple industry jargon, but has taken on a negative meaning over time ? much like the word "silly" once meant "holy."
But "frack" also happens to sound like "smack" and "whack," with more violent connotations.
"When you hear the word `fracking,' what lights up your brain is the profanity," says Deborah Mitchell, who teaches marketing at the University of Wisconsin's School of Business. "Negative things come to mind."
Obama did not use the word in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, when he said his administration will help ensure natural gas will be developed safely, suggesting it would support 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.
In hydraulic fracturing, millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are pumped into wells to break up underground rock formations and create escape routes for the oil and gas. In recent years, the industry has learned to combine the practice with the ability to drill horizontally into beds of shale, layers of fine-grained rock that in some cases have trapped ancient organic matter that has cooked into oil and gas.
By doing so, drillers have unlocked natural gas deposits across the East, South and Midwest that are large enough to supply the U.S. for decades. Natural gas prices have dipped to decade-low levels, reducing customer bills and prompting manufacturers who depend on the fuel to expand operations in the U.S.
Environmentalists worry that the fluid could leak into water supplies from cracked casings in wells. They are also concerned that wastewater from the process could contaminate water supplies if not properly treated or disposed of. And they worry the method allows too much methane, the main component of natural gas and an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas, to escape.
Some want to ban the practice altogether, while others want tighter regulations.
The Environmental Protection Agency is studying the issue and may propose federal regulations. The industry prefers that states regulate the process.
Some states have banned it. A New York proposal to lift its ban drew about 40,000 public comments ? an unprecedented total ? inspired in part by slogans such as "Don't Frack With New York."
The drilling industry has generally spelled the word without a "K," using terms like "frac job" or "frac fluid."
Energy historian Daniel Yergin spells it "fraccing" in his book, "The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World." The glossary maintained by the oilfield services company Schlumberger includes only "frac" and "hydraulic fracturing."
The spelling of "fracking" began appearing in the media and in oil and gas company materials long before the process became controversial. It first was used in an Associated Press story in 1981. That same year, an oil and gas company called Velvet Exploration, based in British Columbia, issued a press release that detailed its plans to complete "fracking" a well.
The word was used in trade journals throughout the 1980s. In 1990, Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher announced U.S. oil engineers would travel to the Soviet Union to share drilling technology, including fracking.
The word does not appear in The Associated Press Stylebook, a guide for news organizations. David Minthorn, deputy standards editor at the AP, says there are tentative plans to include an entry in the 2012 edition.
He said the current standard is to avoid using the word except in direct quotes, and to instead use "hydraulic fracturing."
That won't stop activists ? sometimes called "fracktivists" ? from repeating the word as often as possible.
"It was created by the industry, and the industry is going to have to live with it," says the NRDC's Sinding.
Dave McCurdy, CEO of the American Gas Association, agrees, much to his dismay: "It's Madison Avenue hell," he says.
___
Jonathan Fahey can be reached at http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey.
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Friday, January 27, 2012
Fire badly damages 19th century church in Ukraine (AP)
KIEV, Ukraine ? Emergency officials say a fire has badly damaged a 19th-century Orthodox church in southern Ukraine, including collapsing its dome.
No injuries have been reported.
The fire at the landmark Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in the town of Bolhrad outside the Black Sea port of Odessa broke out Thursday during renovation work, the Emergency Situations Ministry said on its website.
The church's dome collapsed before the fire was put out.
Officials say the fire could have been caused by a violation of safety rules during the renovation.
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Ethiopia: Journalists, politicians get jail time (AP)
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia ? An Ethiopian judge has sentenced a group of five journalists and politicians to prison sentences ranging from 13 years to life.
The five were arrested last year and charged last week under Ethiopia's controversial anti-terrorism laws.
Judge Endeshaw Adane said Thursday that Ethiopia's federal high court found Elias Kifle, editor-in-chief of a U.S.-based opposition website, guilty of terrorism. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Kifle was tried in absentia.
The judge gave prison sentences of 14 years for Wubshet Taye, deputy editor-in-chief of the recently closed-down weekly Awramba Times, and Reeyot Alemu, a columnist of independent weekly Feteh. One opposition politician was sentenced to 13 years, and the other to 19 years.
Reeyot's lawyer, Molla Zegeye, says his client will appeal.
The maximum sentence for terrorism under Ethiopia's anti terrorism laws is capital punishment.
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Thursday, January 26, 2012
You Can?t Start a Fire Without a Spark ? Sparxgear Fire Piston
Sparxgear has designed a Fire Piston, and they are using Kickstarter for funding.? Never heard of a fire piston?? Before the days of matches, fires were often started with a fire piston.? A combustible material – cloth, wood, even milkweek down, etc. – is inserted on the end of? the fire piston.? Quick compression of [...]
Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2012/01/26/you-cant-start-a-fire-without-a-spark-sparxgear-fire-piston/
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FBI releases plans to monitor social networks
Jim Giles, consultant
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them.
The information comes from a document released on 19 January looking for companies who might want to build a monitoring system for the FBI. It spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by 10 February.
The bureau's wish list calls for the system to be able to automatically search "publicly available" material from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for keywords relating to terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other FBI missions. Agents would be alerted if the searches produce evidence of "breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats".
Agents will have the option of displaying the tweets and other material captured by the system on a map, to which they can add layers of other data, including the locations of US embassies and military installations, details of previous terrorist attacks and the output from local traffic cameras.
The document suggests that the bureau wants to use social media to target specific users or groups of users. It notes that agents need to "locate bad actors...and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions". It also states that the bureau will use social media to create "pattern-of-life matrices" -- presumably logs of targets' daily routines -- that will aid law enforcement in planning operations.
The use of the term "publicly available" suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be able to exempt themselves from the monitoring by making their posts private. But the desire of the US government to watch everyone may still have an unwelcome impact, warns Jennifer Lynch at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy group.
Lynch says that many people post to social media in the expectation that only their friends and followers are reading, which gives them "the sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse," says Lynch. "But these tools that mine open source data and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the US".
The document also suggests that the FBI thinks it can use social media to peer into the future. It notes that agents need to use social media to "[p]redict likely developments in the situation or future actions taken by bad actors (by conducting, [sic] trend, pattern, association, and timeline analysis)".
The bureau declined to immediately comment on how this analysis might work, or on any other aspect of the document, but the idea of turning agents into digital soothsayers is plausible: researchers working at Facebook and in academia have shown that social media can be used to infer many things about an individual, including the existence of friendships that are not declared on social networking sites and the location of users who have not revealed where they are based.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Kevin Federline Hospitalized for Minor Cardiac Arrest
Kevin Federline has had a bit of a rough time filming the weight-loss reality show Excess Baggage in Australia. Britney Spears' ex-husband collapsed on Monday after experiencing chest pains while participating in a challenge with an Australian football team. Ther 33-year-old was taken by ambulance to Mt. Druitt Hospital, where he was treated for symptoms of minor cardiac arrest, according to the Australian Associated Press. Test results showed that he had not suffered a heart attack, contrary to reports from some media outlets.
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Hilary Duff Hits Recording Studio 7 Months Pregnant! (omg!)
Hilary Duff has a baby on board and now perhaps a new album, too?
The very pregnant singer/actress, who was all smiles while leaving Pilates class on Friday in Toluca Lake, Calif., seems to have been inspired by her soon-to-be motherhood status and hit up the recording studio the day before.
PHOTOS: Hilary Duff then and now
"@matt_squire ooooooo excitement ensuing ...now! recording all day!" the star, who's 7-months-pregnant, tweeted Thursday.
"Such an amazing session with @HilaryDuff yesterday!! Xcited!!!!!" music producer and writer Matt Squire tweeted at Duff following day.
PHOTOS: Baby bump hall of fame
The 24-year-old Lizzie McGuire actress and her hubby, NHL player Mike Comrie, 31, are expecting a baby boy this coming March. While she "can't wait" to meet her son, she's been keeping an eye on her music, too.
PHOTOS: Other stars who romanced athletes
Back in October, Duff explained to E! News what's in store for her career. "Before I got pregnant I was thinking about making a record so I still want to do that," Duff, whose most recent album, Dignity, was released in 2007, said.
"I think that after I have the baby I'll want to sit still for a few months and learn how to be a really good mom, " she continued. "And then there's no reason why I can't put a record out and tour...It might take a little while but I'm really excited about it."
Tell Us: Are you hoping Duff comes out with another album?
Get more Us! Follow us on Twitter, Friend us on Facebook, Subscribe to Us Weekly
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Gadhafi loyalists seize Libyan city (AP)
BENGHAZI, Libya ? Moammar Gadhafi loyalists seized control of a Libyan mountain city in the most serious challenge to the central government since the strongman's fall, underlining the increasing weakness of Libya's Western-backed rulers as they try to unify the country under their authority.
The taking of Bani Walid, one of the last Gadhafi strongholds captured by the new leadership late last year, was the first such organized operation by armed remnants of Gadhafi's regime. A simultaneous outbreak of shootings in the capital and Libya's second largest city Benghazi raised authorities' concerned that other networks of loyalists were active elsewhere.
The security woes add to the difficulties of the ruling National Transitional Council, which is struggling to establish its authority and show Libyans progress in stability and good government. Bani Walid's fall comes after violent protests in Benghazi, where Libyans angry over lack of reform stormed the NTC headquarters and trashed offices.
In Bani Walid, hundreds of well-equipped and highly trained remnants of Gadhafi's forces battled for eight hours on Monday with the local pro-NTC revolutionary brigade, known as the May 28 Brigade, said Mubarak al-Fatmani, the head of Bani Walid local council. The brigade was driven out and Gadhafi loyalists then raised their old green flag over buildings in the western city.
Four revolutionary fighters were killed and 25 others were wounded in the fighting, al-Fatmani said.
There were no immediate signs that the uprising was part of some direct attempt to restore the family of Gadhafi, who was swept out of power in August and then killed in the nearby city of Sirte in October. His sons, daughter and wife have been killed, arrested or have fled to neighboring countries.
Instead, the fighting seemed to reflect a rejection of NTC control by a city that never deeply accepted its rule, highlighting the still unresolved tensions between those who benefited under Gadhafi's regime and those now in power. Those tensions are tightly wound up with tribal and regional rivalries around the country.
The May 28 Brigade had kept only a superficial control over the city, the head of Bani Walid's military council, Abdullah al-Khazmi, acknowledged.
"The only link between Bani Walid and the revolution was May 28, now it is gone and 99 percent of Bani Walid people are Gadhafi loyalists," he said.
He spoke to The Associated Press at a position on the eastern outskirts of Bani Walid, where hundreds of pro-NTC reinforcements from Benghazi were deployed with convoys of cars mounted with machine guns, though there was no immediate move to retake the city.
The fighters who captured the city Monday night belong to Brigade 93, a militia newly created by Gadhafi loyalists who reassembled after the fall of the regime, said al-Khazmi and al-Fatmani. The fighters, flush with cash and heavy weaponry including incendiary bombs, have been increasing in power in the city, they said.
There was no possibility to confirm their claims. However, there were no mass evacuations from the town after the clashes, an indication that the residents appear to accept the new arrangement, said Ali al-Fatmani, a revolutionary brigade commander in Bani Walid.
Authorities in Benghazi, where the NTC is centered, appeared concerned that the Bani Walid uprising could have sent a signal to other cells of Gadhafi forces.
An AP reporter who was present in the Benghazi operation room heard military commanders on Monday saying coordinated incidents of drive-by shootings in Tripoli and, to a lesser extent, Benghazi erupted as news of the Bani Walid takeover spread. In Tripoli, some shops closed, and fighters responsible for security in the capital were on a state of alert over the shootings.
Five months since the Gadhafi regime's fall and three months since his death, the National Transitional Council has so far made little progress in unifying its armed forces. Instead it relies largely on multiple "revolutionary brigades," militias made up of citizens-turned-fighters, usually all from a specific city or even neighborhood.
The militias were created during the months of civil war against Gadhafi's forces last year, and since the war ended in October, the various brigades remain in control of security affairs of each city they liberated. Though loyal to the NTC, they have also feuded among themselves and acted on their own initiative, and the council has been unable to control them.
A month ago, Gadhafi loyalists attacked another revolutionary brigade from Tripoli that entered Bani Walid, killing 13, said Mubarak al-Fatmani.
"The council (NTC) did absolutely nothing," said al-Fatmani, who resigned from his local council chief post to protest the NTC's failure to investigate the ambush. He still holds his position, since his resignation has not yet been accepted.
The council has faced increasing complaints that it is doing little to bring stability to the country. It faces a daunting task, since Gadhafi's regime stripped Libya of most institutions, and the civil war has stirred up widespread divisions, rivalries and resentments.
In the Benghazi unrest last Saturday, protesters broke into the NTC headquarters, smashed windows and carted off furniture and electronics, then threw bottles at NTC chief Mustafa Abdul-Jalil as he tried to address them and torched his car. The next day, Abdul-Jalil suspended the Benghazi representatives on the council in an apparent attempt to appease protesters. The deputy chief of the NTC resigned in protest over the suspension.
Bani Walid, a city of 100,000 located in the mountains 90 miles (140 kilometers) southeast of Tripoli, held out for weeks against revolutionary forces after Gadhafi's fall from power, with loyalist fighters dug into its formidable terrain of valleys and crevasses. Pro-NTC fighters finally took it in October.
The main tribe in Bani Walid is a branch of the Warfala tribal confederation, which stretches around the country with around 1 million members. The Bani Walid branch was one of the most privileged under Gadhafi, who gave them top positions and used their fighters to try to crush protests in the early months of last year's uprising against his rule.
That has left a deep enmity between the tribe and others. Ali al-Fatmani said Bani Walid loyalists were among Gadhafi troops that tried to march on Benghazi during the civil war and were used to in the siege of Zawiya, west of Tripoli. There were reports, he said, that Bani Walid fighters desecrated graves of fallen revolutionary fighters in Zawiya.
"The hatred and mistrust have been building up during the revolution," said al-Fatmani, himself a Warfala.
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Should You Buy Travel Insurance?
If you?ve booked a vacation for your family lately, or sent your kid off on a school-sponsored field trip, you?ve probably considered trip-cancellation insurance. These offers generally promise to reimburse you for the vacation or field trip if you need to cancel. Are these plans worth the cost? It depends on your own personal risk calculation.
What does it cover?
Trip cancellation insurance comes in several flavors. Basic coverage reimburses you if you can?t make your trip because of certain reasons, such as if you get sick, a hurricane rakes the island you were going to visit, or terrorists attack your hotel. The insurance covers non-refundable expenses, so if the tour operator cancels your tour and they refund your fee, for example, the insurance does not pay.
The basic coverage also generally provides benefits if your trip is delayed or interrupted. It also pays for lost or delayed baggage, some medical benefits if you?re injured during your vacation, and emergency evacuation if something horrible happens during your vacay.
You can add to the basics. For example, for an extra fee you can add ?cancel-for-any-reason? coverage, which reimburses you for at least part of the non-refundable portion of your trip if you cancel for any reason not covered by the usual terms. Other common upgrades are rental car insurance and accidental death insurance at higher amounts than the basic package offers.
Needless to say, read the terms carefully before you buy so you fully understand what is covered.
What does it cost?
How much does all of this cost? Prices vary, of course. In a comparison of four leading providers, basic coverage for a family of four on a $4,000, week-long, domestic vacation ranged from $82 for a policy from Travel Insured to $275 for a policy form HTH Worldwide.
Those two plans differed mostly in the amount of coverage. For example, the HTH plan included $500,000 in health coverage, while the Travel Insured plan offered $10,000; and the HTH plan offered $1 million emergency medical evacuation coverage, while the Travel Insured plan provided $100,000 coverage for that service.
In addition to the two firms mentioned above, popular trip cancellation insurance firms include American Express, Travelguard, and Access America. Insuremytrip.com is a site that allows users to compare rates from about 20 providers.
Furthermore, many trip providers, such as school field trip organizers, offer their own policies. As do some credit cards ? be sure to see if your card provides this coverage before spending money on a separate policy.
But do you need it?
This all sounds good, but you should evaluate this kind of insurance the same way you would evaluate any kind of insurance. Rather than thinking, ?Wow, I?d love to get reimbursed for our vacation if my kid gets the flu the night before,? think, ?Hmmm, what are the odds my kid is going to get the flu the night before our vacation??
Use the $4,000 family vacation above as an example. Let?s say you?re considering a plan that costs $200 and will reimburse you for the full $4,000 if someone in the family gets sick and you have to cancel. Forget about the rest of the coverage ? emergency medical evacuation, health insurance, death benefits, etc. ? for the moment and focus on the real reason you might get this insurance: to refund your purchase price.
If you buy this policy, you are essentially gambling $200 against a potential pay-out of $4,000. What are the odds that you will ?win? this gamble? You?ll win if one of you gets sick or a big storm hits the vacation site or whatever. So what are the odds of that? One way to calculate those odds for your family is to look at history: How many vacations have you had to cancel in the past few years? If you have taken ten vacations over the past five years, and cancelled one of them because of a covered reason, you could assume that the odds of you having to cancel your current, $4,000 vacation are one in ten.
So think about it: If your neighborhood bookie put $4,000 on your kitchen table and said you could have it if you drew the right card out of a stack of ten, would you pay him $200 for that one draw? Probably not, unless you?re really into taking risks.
But here?s another way to think about it: If you bought the insurance every time, you would come out even if you were able to collect on the insurance once for every 20 trips. Now it doesn?t sound that risky, especially if you travel a lot.
Obviously, many factors play into your personal risk calculation ? maybe you are not traveling with any accident-prone children or maybe you know the tourist destination you are headed to frequently has hurricanes (hmm, maybe you want to rethink this vacation!). The point is, whatever the circumstances, make a rough guess of your odds of using the insurance before you plunk down the money.
Insurance companies do this with highly trained actuaries using sophisticated algorithms and databases full of historical information, but you can make an educated guess without any of that.
That way, whether you get the insurance or not, you will rest easy knowing that you made an informed decision.
Source: http://www.fivecentnickel.com/2012/01/24/should-you-buy-travel-insurance/
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Monday, January 23, 2012
Poland defends stance on treaty after web attacks (AP)
WARSAW, Poland ? Polish officials vowed Monday to stick to plans to sign an international copyright treaty that has outraged Internet activists and prompted an attack on government websites.
A government minister, Michal Boni, defended the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. He said that signing the international treaty would not hamper Internet usage and that Poland will sign it on Thursday, as planned.
"The ACTA agreement in no way changes Polish laws or the rights of Internet users and Internet usage," Boni, the minister of administration and digitization, said after a meeting with Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski.
Internet opponents of ACTA fear it could lead to censorship online.
Monday's developments came after a Twitter account using the name "AnonymousWiki" announced plans on the weekend to attack government websites to protest the government's support for ACTA. Within hours on Sunday, the websites of the prime minister, parliament and other government offices were unreachable or sluggish, the hallmarks of a denial-of-service attack.
The technique works by directing streams of bogus traffic at a website, jamming it in the same way that a telephone line can be overwhelmed by hundreds of prank calls.
In an initial response Sunday, government spokesman Pawel Gras suggested there hadn't been an attack at all on the sites. "This isn't an attack by hackers, but just the result of huge interest in the sites" of the government offices, he said, a comment that quickly became a source of ridicule on Facebook and other Internet sites.
By Monday, with the sites still paralyzed, the prime minister held a meeting to reconsider their stance on the treaty.
"It was a velvet attack by hackers, but still it was an attack. Pawel Gras was wrong," said Slawomir Neumann, a lawmaker with the government Civic Platform party. Neumann said the situation showed that the Polish government is poorly prepared to handle such attacks.
Boni acknowledged in a radio interview Monday morning that the government had failed to hold enough consultations with the public on the matter.
An opposition party, the Democratic Left Alliance, also called on the government to not sign the treaty in a gesture of solidarity with those who warn it could hurt Internet freedom.
Anonymous, the group suspected of involvement in the attacks, made a number of threats before and during the Internet disruptions.
"Dear Polish government, we will continue to disrupt and interfere with your government official websites until the 26th. Do not pass ACTA," one tweet by AnonymousWiki said.
It also threatened more trouble should Poland sign ACTA.
"We have dox files and leaked documentations on many Poland officials, if ACTA is passed, we will release these documents," AnonymousWiki said in a separate tweet.
Although its scope is broader, ACTA shares some similarities with the hotly debated Stop Online Piracy Act, which was shelved by U.S. lawmakers last week after Wikipedia and Google blacked out or partially obscured their websites for a day as part of a protest against Web censorship.
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ASUS sneak attacks the business world with 12.5-inch B23E laptop
ASUS sneak attacks the business world with 12.5-inch B23E laptop originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sunday, January 22, 2012
Alesis brings a pair of new musician-friendly iPad docks to NAMM
Continue reading Alesis brings a pair of new musician-friendly iPad docks to NAMM
Alesis brings a pair of new musician-friendly iPad docks to NAMM originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PermalinkGear Diary | Alesis 1, 2 | Email this | CommentsSource: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/20/alesis-brings-a-pair-of-new-musician-friendly-ipad-docks-to-namm/
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